Asia Information Security Community Blog – Risk & Cybersecurity

Is an ad-based business model the original sin of the web — and if so, what do we do about it?

Is the lack of a transparent and convenient payment system for consuming content hinder Internet growth? There is a vicious circle the author did not mention. Ad-based business model fuels the creation of content specially fit for ads, both format and subject! User behaviour also adopt to bite size content. We are stuck but very few is searching for a way out.

Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT and co-founder of the blog network Global Voices, argues in a fascinating post at The Atlantic that the “original sin” of the internet was that almost every web business defaulted to an advertising-based business model — and that this in turn led to the privacy-invading, data-collecting policies that are the foundation of companies like Facebook and Google. But is that true? And if so, what should we do about it?

Zuckerman says his thoughts around advertising and its effects were shaped in part by a presentation that developer Maciej Ceglowski gave at a conference in Germany earlier this year. Ceglowski is the founder of Pinboard, a site that allows users to bookmark and store webpages, and someone who has argued in the past that free, ad-supported services are bad for users, since they usually wind up having…